Join Peabody Essex Museum curator-at-large George H. Schwartz for an exploration of Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums (on view September 14, 2024 to February 2, 2025). This multisensory exhibition explores the essential role art and objects played for mediums and magicians “communicating” with the dead during the 19th- and 20th-century Spiritualism movement in the United States and Europe – a time when people actively debated and wondered, “can spirits return?” Paintings, posters, photographs, stage apparatuses, film, publications and other objects transport visitors to the age of the Fox sisters and the Davenport Brothers, Harry Kellar and Howard Thurston, Harry Houdini and Margery the Medium, among many others. This exhibition also touches on Spiritualism’s influence on scientific and social thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the role of mediums and magicians as a source of agency and reinvention; and how the intersecting components of science and spirituality relates to our contemporary world.
--
George H. Schwartz, PhD is curator-at-large at the Peabody Essex Museum, where he curates exhibitions and specializes in maritime art, material culture, early collecting and museum history, and how global objects shaped an emerging national identity in the early United States. He also teaches material culture at Tufts University in the museum studies program.